1 Corinthians 15:51-57 Easter Festival
Pastor Ron Koehler
Grace—Tucson, AZ April 17, 2022
CHRIST’S VICTORY MEANS YOUR VICTORY! There you are sitting on a folding chair, listening to the last of your opponents, the only one standing between you and the spelling bee championship. And they misspell the word! You’re excited…and a little nervous…but confident too. All you have to do is spell one more word correctly and the trophy and the bragging rights are yours! “Orthography. O-r-t-h-o-g-r-a-p-h-y. Orthography.” You nail it. You throw your hands up into the air and sprint around the gym, taking a victory lap. Confetti and balloons fill the air. The happy, old-school sound of Kool and the Gang’s “Celebration” pumps through the best speaker system a grade school has ever had! Okay, that victory celebration was all in your head, but that’s how you felt! Sweet victory! Now, some of you would have spelled orthography with two “f’s” at the end, but even though you can’t spell, once upon a time you killed it on the field or the court. Or maybe you take great satisfaction in conquering the nastiest of opponents—your family—as you sit at the kitchen table and you lay down your last UNO card. You beat cancer. That addiction? You’re winning the battle every day and you’ve been doing that for a long time. This is what victory looks like to us. On this Easter morning, we’re talking about victory, but it’s a win that doesn’t really look like those kinds of victories because all of those you work for. You earn them. Today we celebrate a victory that is given to us even though we had nothing to do with it. That’s pretty unusual because what we know is that victories are earned, not received as gifts. This victory is a bit of a mystery, a secret, as it says here in 1 Corinthians. You and I can only come to know and understand and believe the victory that Easter brings if God reveals it to us. And today he does. Before we get to the mystery of our victory, we first have to know about Christ’s victory because Christ’s victory preceded your victory, and CHRIST’S VICTORY MEANS YOUR VICTORY! Christ Gained the Victory On Easter, I don’t need to ask you why we are here this morning, other than we’re always here on Sunday mornings. Even if church is not that familiar to you, and you feel like your knowledge of the Bible isn’t that great, you, along with everyone else here, at least know that on Easter Christians celebrate Jesus rising from death. We heard the Easter proclamation in the gospel this morning “He is not here, but has been raised!” A stone rolled away. An empty tomb. The angel’s message. Victory!
Death defeated. The grave beaten. Victory!
These things are why we are here. This is why we have special music and singing, a breakfast, a concert, and two different services. Today we—literally—pull out all the stops to celebrate Jesus’ rising from death! Christ’s resurrection doesn’t tell the whole story, though, any more than reading the final score of baseball game tells the story of how that came to be. The backstory to Jesus’ Easter morning victory is vital for us to know. If all we know is that Jesus died and came back to life, that’s simply information. Then we might just sit here and appreciate the seeming impossibility of such a thing and say, “That’s cool.” Or we could be happy for Jesus: “Good for him!” Then again, maybe we wouldn’t be so impressed: “Well, he’s God, so…” Easter is about more than that. What preceded that day was directly involved in what happened on that Sunday morning and is vital to understanding Easter. I’d like to take us back to Christmas for a moment. Christ’s long march to Easter victory began when he willingly came into this world, born to Mary—not simply a human being, but also true God—sinless from the start. What followed was thirty-three years of sinlessness, perfect obedience to God’s law. That meant thirty-three years of keeping every one of the Ten Commandments, along with the other commands and expectations that God’s people lived under. Thirty-three years. His entire life. No imperfect actions. No words offensive to God. No internal thoughts detected only by his Father, but detestable to him. Perfection. How have you done this morning? Has it been a morning of perfection before God? No dissatisfaction over what you have to wear for this special day? No short temper with kids who aren’t behaving? No frustration over the person who almost made you late (on Easter!)? No inappropriate words? No selfish distractions from the most important thing on this most important day? No errant thoughts while here in worship? No worrying that things won’t go just right? A morning of perfection? Likely not. Certainly, none of us has ever known a single day of perfection, much less a lifetime— which is damning for all of us. And that’s just it. Jesus came and lived a sinless life because we can’t, to save us from an eternal separation from God. The eternal salvation of sinful people required this life of perfection to be given as a sacrifice, a payment for their sin. After a life of complete obedience and telling people that he came to do that out of love for them, Jesus met fierce rejection. Before Easter morning came, opposition by powerful people resulted in the awful events of Good Friday—the horrible torture of the innocent Jesus and an unjustified, unimaginably painful death on the cross. And most devastating of all, he suffered the hell of his heavenly Father turning away from him because he was loaded down with our sin. Then his body was taken by death, and the grave grabbed it and set in on its shelf.
But it was not final, as we know death and the grave to be. Not at all. Death and the grave appeared to have won, but only for a few days. In the Apostle Paul’s words before us today, you saw that he referred to something we heard in today’s first reading from the prophet Isaiah: Death is swallowed up in victory. Death and the grave swallow every person, removing them from this earth. They appeared to have done the same with Jesus. But he turned it around on death, and with his resurrection, he consumed it! I would imagine that some of you here have been among the 11,500 people per year in Arizona who have suffered scorpion stings. That stinger injected venom into you and caused a lot of pain—maybe shortness of breath, numbness, tingling, the inability to move the body part that was stung, the sensation of electrical jolts, vomiting. Thousands of people are stung by scorpions every year, but it is rare for people to die from those stings. If you’re careful—and fortunate—you may never be stung by a scorpion, but death seems to sting everyone. It says here that the sting of death is sin. God’s law judges all of us to be sinful before him, and sin results in death. You know, if the scorpion’s stinger were to be removed, it would be a harmless thing. What if the stinger of sin could be removed? Then death would be a harmless thing! This is why Jesus came. The innocent Savior stepped in, placed our sins on himself, and took sin’s stinger for us. The cross brought his death as a result. Death appeared to be victorious on that Friday…and Saturday…and in the earliest hours of Sunday. But Christ won the victory when he was raised to life and the graveclothes were left lying on the cold bench of the burial cave whose entombing stone was rolled away! Christ Has Given His Victory to You! This is the victory cry: Death is swallowed up in victory! There is no more sting to death, and the grave is not victorious! That was true for Jesus and it is true for us! Christ’s Victory Means Your Victory because he has given it to you! When Paul wrote, We will not all sleep, but we will be changed, he addressed a concern that some may have had regarding the Day of Resurrection when Christ will return. We might even have the same question: The dead who trusted in Christ will be resurrected, but what about those who are still alive? What will happen to them? Paul explains that it doesn’t really matter. What happens will be the same for those who have been decomposing in the grave and for those living and breathing at that moment. All will be changed. Sin-affected bodies—both dead and alive—will be transformed, changed, perfected so that they will be fit to live with the perfect, holy God for all eternity.
I was looking in the fridge for some salsa the other day, and I found a jar with some left in it, but I wasn’t sure how long it had been in there. We occasionally have things that look like unintentional science projects in there—maybe you do too—so I looked for an expiration date. After that date, we know all bets are off because food is perishable. Well, I didn’t find an expiration date, so out it went. You’re not going to find an expiration date printed on any of us either, but we all have one. We too are perishable. But Christ’s resurrection declares that just as he rose in glory, those who trust in him will also rise and be made imperishable. In heaven, we will not “go bad;” We will have no sin, and we cannot die. Mortal here, but immortal in heaven. This change will happen in an instant, in the blink of an eye, just as Judgment Day’s trumpet rings out. God declares that Christ’s Victory Means Your Victory. Today, he invites you to look off into the future to see the victory that will be yours when Christ returns to judge the living and the dead. Now, normally, we know that it is not a good idea to count our chickens before they’ve hatched. Lots of things can happen to ruin what we believe will happen. But that can’t happen with God! When God makes a promise, it is a done deal! The Lord promised Noah that it was going to rain—a lot—and it did. He promised Abraham he would have a son even though he and Sarah were much too old to have children. Turns out God was right. He promised the Israelites victories over their enemies and a Promised Land. It all happened. He made promises to his people throughout the centuries and every single time, God made good on the promises. And about what is absolutely the most important thing ever, God has made you a promise you can trust: he says that he gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ! This promise of God tells us that our sins have been paid for—we are free from guilt! Death has been defeated—we are free from its threat! We are set free to now live for Jesus, who lived and died and rose for us. He was victorious over sin and death, and he credits his victory to us. Christ’s Victory Means Your Victory! So, on that Resurrection Day, what we say today will find its fulfillment: “Death, where is your sting? Grave, where is your victory?” Death and the sin that brings it about will be proved powerless! While we wait for that day, we live with joy and trust in this promise. And we give thanks to God for this amazing gift not only on Easter morning, but every day as we look forward to our victory, our resurrection to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. The peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard you hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Amen.